Been in the Storm So Long

by Leon F. Litwack

  “Well, old man, you’re free now.”

  “I dunno, master. They say all the colored people’s free; they do say it certain; but I’m a-goin on same as I alius has been.”

  “Why, you get wages now, don’t you?”

  “No, sir; my mistress never said anything to me that I was to have wages, nor yet that I was free; nor I never said anything to her. Ye see I left it to her honor to talk to me about it, because I was afraid she’d say I was insultin’ to her and presumin’, so I wouldn’t speak first. She ha’n’t spoke yet.”

  Bewildered by these responses, the reporter finally asked him if he intended to work on “just the same” until he died. At this point the loyal slave made it clear that although good manners and a sense of mutual obligations had kept him from asserting his freedom, he was quite prepared to impose deadlines on his patience.

  “Ye see, master, I am ashamed to say anything to her. But I don’t ’low to work any longer than to Christmas [1865], and then I’ll ask for wages. But I want to leave the ferry. I’m a mighty good farmer, and I’ll get a piece of ground and a chunk of a hoss, if I can, and work for myself.”42

  The number of slaves who waited for the master to confirm their freedom, rather than assert it independently, is not altogether surprising. Whether the enslaved worker had labored on a plantation or a farm, he had been brought up to view his master as the primary source of authority—the provider and the protector, the lawmaker and the enforcer, the judge and the jury, and most masters had deliberately cultivated feelings of dependency and helplessness in their slaves. No edict of emancipation could immediately obliterate the habits of obedience and deference with which many slaves had been inculcated since childhood. Nor could it in some instances destroy a familiar relationship worked out over a period of time, involving mutual obligations of service, sustenance, and protection. The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery no doubt weakened the master’s stature in the eyes of many slaves. But it did not necessarily lessen the respect, fear, and obedience he commanded by virtue of his authority and economic power. “A lot o’ de niggers knowed nothin’ ’cept what missus and marster tole us,” a former Georgia slave observed. “What dey said wus just de same as de Lawd had spoken to us.” And in this instance, he told them that Lincoln was dead, they were still slaves, and he would distribute black cloth so they could mourn both Lincoln and their freedom.43

  But there were sharply contrasting stories, too, which revealed the compelling need some slaves felt to confront their masters and mistresses with the truth about freedom, if for no other reason than to remove the last doubts and to observe their reactions. Hired out to another family during the war, a Virginia slave had been working in the fields when a friend informed her that she was now free. “Is dat so?” she exclaimed. Dropping her hoe, she ran the seven miles to her old place, found her mistress, “looked at her real hard,” and then shouted, “I’se free! Yes, I’se free! Ain’t got to work fo’ you no mo’. You can’t put me in yo’ pocket now!” Her mistress broke into tears and ran into the house. That was all the slave needed to see. The momentary doubt at hearing the news had been resolved, and for the first time she could begin to think of herself as a free woman.44

  The legends that grew out of emancipation would assume a special place in the folk history of Afro-Americans. Like their white owners, they retained strong, often emotionally charged memories of this critical moment in their lives. In the interviews with former slaves conducted more than seventy years later, no event would stand out with greater clarity in their minds than the day they heard of their freedom. Even as many of the slave descendants moved into the urban North in the next century, the stories of emancipation would follow them. That was how Kathryn L. Morgan came to learn of her great-grandmother Caddy, a strong-willed and defiant slave who had been sold many times in her life but never ceased to torment her owners. Of the many tales about this remarkable woman, the one that became the favorite among her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren was about the day she learned of her freedom.

  Caddy had been sold to a man in Goodman, Mississippi. It was terrible to be sold in Mississippi. In fact, it was terrible to be sold anywhere. She had been put to work in the fields for running away again. She was hoeing a crop when she heard that General Lee had surrendered. Do you know who General Lee was? He was the man who was working for the South in the Civil War. When General Lee surrendered that meant that all the colored people were free! Caddy threw down that hoe, she marched herself up to the big house, then, she looked around and found the mistress. She went over to the mistress, she flipped up her dress and told the white woman to do something. She said it mean and ugly. This is what she said: Kiss my ass!45

  4

  ALTHOUGH THE TIME and manner varied from place to place, the majority of masters eventually got around to informing their slaves that emancipation had become the law of the land. Occasionally, they did so under the compulsion of a Federal order, upon the visitation of a Freedmen’s Bureau officer, or at the demand of their own slaves. Usually, the master himself decided how and when to make the announcement. When he sent out the word for his slaves to assemble the next day, nearly everyone knew what to expect. “There was little, if any, sleep that night,” Booker T. Washington recalled. “All was excitement and expectancy.” Except perhaps for the coming of the Yankees, it was like no other day in their lives. Outside the Big House, the master waited for them on the front porch, often with his entire family standing beside him. To the very end, he would invariably act the role of the patrician, even as he presided over the dispersion of his flock and the sundering of traditional and even intimate ties. Observing how their master “couldn’t help but cry” or “couldn’t hardly talk,” some former slaves confessed to having felt a certain compassion for him at this moment, putting the best possible face on his previous treatment of them. “We couldn’t help thinking about what a good marster he always had been,” a former Georgia slave recalled, “and how old, and feeble, and gray headed he looked as he kept on a-talkin’ that day.” Such sentiments were not shared by all slaves, not even on the same plantation, and each black had a different way of recollecting a master’s or mistress’s tears at the moment of emancipation. “Missy, she cries and cries, and tells us we is free,” a former Louisiana slave recalled, “and she hopes we starve to death and she’d be glad, ’cause it ruin her to lose us.”46

  Once the slaves had been assembled for the master’s announcement, most of them stood quietly and anxiously, waiting to hear how he would choose to tell them of their freedom. Some of them remained apprehensive, recalling that the only previous occasion for such a gathering had been to tell them they had been sold. Before his master could say a word, Robert Falls remembered questioning him in a mocking manner, “Old Marster, what you got to tell us?” His mother quickly warned him that he would be whipped but the slave owner decided instead to use the outburst to make his point. As Falls recalled his words:

  No I wont whip you. Never no more. Sit down thar all of you and listen to what I got to tell you. I hates to do it but I must. You all aint my niggers no more. You is free. Just as free as I am. Here I have raised you all to work for me, and now you are going to leave me. I am an old man, and I cant get along without you. I dont know what I am going to do.

  In less than ten months, he was dead. “Well, sir,” Falls explained, “it killed him.”47

  What the slaves recalled most vividly, “jes like it yestiddy,” was the manner in which the master recognized their freedom, both his words and temperament at that moment. The way he imparted the information revealed much about his state of mind, the kind of relationship he thought he enjoyed with his slaves, and how he viewed the future. He first read to them some official-looking paper setting forth the details of emancipation. It might have been the Emancipation Proclamation itself or a recent Federal circular; in any event, the language was cold, detached, bureaucratic, and often incomprehensible. After the
formal reading, Silas Smith of South Carolina remembered, “us still sets, kaise no writing never aggrevated us niggers way back dar.” Since such a moment called for absolute clarity, most masters obliged with their own explanation, and those were the words the slaves had waited to hear. “We didn’t quite understand what it was all about,” a former Missouri field hand recalled, “until he informed us that it meant we were slaves no longer, that we were free to go as we liked, to work for anyone who would hire us and be responsible to no one but ourselves.” As if to underscore the significance of his remarks, and perhaps in some instances to commemorate the slave’s graduation to a different status, some masters ceremonially presented to each of them “de age statement,” which included his or her name, place of birth, and approximate age or date of birth. “I’s 16 year when surrender come,” Sam Jones Washington told an interviewer many years later. “I knows dat, ’cause of massa’s statement. All us niggers gits de statement when surrender come.”48

  To free his blacks was not to surrender the convictions with which he had held them as slaves. In explaining to them the circumstances that now made freedom necessary, most masters made it abundantly clear that their actions did not flow from some long-repressed humanitarian urge. “We went to the war and fought,” a Texas planter declared, “but the Yankees done whup us, and they say the niggers is free.” That was the typical explanation, as most ex-slaves recalled it: they were now free “ ’cause de gov’ment say you is free” or “ ’cause the damned Yankees done ’creed you are.” If some slaves had felt that only “massa” could free them, many masters insisted that the Yankees had set them free. That they chose to view emancipation in these terms was perfectly consistent with their own self-image. “I have seen slavery in every Southern State,” a prominent Virginian concluded in June 1865, “and I am convinced that for the slave it is the best condition in every way that has been devised.” The “tens of thousands” of old men, women, and children he expected would now starve for lack of support only made him that much more certain. “A Farmer now has to pay his hands and he will keep none but such as will work well, women with families and old men are not worth their food and they are being turned adrift by the thousands.” As many masters viewed this moment, then, if they had acted from humanitarian considerations, they would have retained slavery, because of the protection and sustenance it afforded a people incapable of caring for themselves.49

  If slaveholders felt morally reprehensible or guilt-ridden, they evinced no indication of it at the moment they declared their blacks to be free. Nothing in the postwar behavior and attitudes of these people suggested that the ownership of slaves had necessarily compromised their values or tortured their consciences. Nor was there any reason to suspect hypocrisy or self-deception in the “strong conviction” of Henry W. Ravenel, for example, “that the old relation of master & slave, had received the divine sanction & was the best condition in which the two races could live together for mutual benefit.” Any detectable twinges of conscience in the slaveholding class largely stemmed from the realization that some had abused the institution. But like any northern employer, the master maintained that the excesses of the few should not be permitted to question or undermine the system itself. Nor were most of them intent on foisting the responsibility for bondage on the New Englanders who had initially supplied them. After all, a New Orleans newspaper observed several years after the war, the transplantation from Africa to North America had “humanized” the Negro, regenerating him in body, mind, and morals. Rather than confess any misgivings about their slaveholding past, most masters at this moment viewed themselves as decent men, good Christians who had performed a useful, necessary, and benevolent task, fulfilling an obligation to an inferior people which more than compensated for the labor they had received in return. There was nothing for which they needed to apologize. As George A. Trenholm proudly told the Chamber of Commerce of Augusta, Georgia, in early 1866, “Sir, we have educated them. We took them barbarians, we returned them Christianized and civilized to those from whom we received them; we paid for them, we return them without compensation. Our consciences are clear, our hands are clean.”50

  If any slave owner felt the need to reassure himself, he might use the occasion of emancipation to remind the assembled blacks how well they had fared under his tutelage. After making precisely that point, a Texas planter who had moved his slaves there from Virginia during the war asked them if he had ever treated anyone meanly. Every one of the slaves, Liza Smith recalled, shouted, “No, sir!” and that brought a smile to their master’s face. Equally confident of his image, Isaiah Day, known to his slaves as “Papa Day” because he never liked the title of master, read the official proclamation and then told them, as one of his slaves recalled: “De gov’ment don’t need to tell you you is free, ’cause you been free all you days. If you wants to stay you can and if you wants to go, you can. But if you go, lots of white folks ain’t gwine treat you like I does.” With slightly less confidence, a Georgia planter, proud of the behavior of his slaves during the Yankee occupation, confessed to them, as he freed them, that he had never realized the extent of their love for him. “He told us he had done tried to be good to us and had done de best he could for us,” one of his former slaves recalled. John Bonner, an Alabama planter, after reminding his slaves how well he had provided for them, simply warned any who now chose to leave that they would “jes’ have to root, pig, or die.”51

  To impress his freed slaves with the bounties and security they had enjoyed was less designed to assuage any feelings of guilt than to entice them to remain with him. That prime consideration elicited many a personal note in the master’s announcement of freedom. With tears in his eyes, his head bowed, and his hands clasped behind his back, the Reverend Robert Turner, a preacher, farmer, and storekeeper, told his newly freed slaves how much he admired each of them, appreciated their faithfulness, and hated to lose them. The appeal had no apparent effect, as nearly every one of his blacks left him. To remind their slaves of the “good life” they had provided them, some masters chose to celebrate emancipation with a bountiful feast or party. On a plantation in Harnett County, North Carolina, Taylor Hugh McLean called his slaves out of the fields, met them at the gate, told them they were free, and invited them to eat dinner. It proved to be a feast few of them could forget.

  He had five women cooking. He told them all he did not want them to leave, but if they were going they must eat before they left. He said he wanted everybody to eat all he wanted, and I remember the ham, eggs, chicken, and other good things we had at that dinner. Then after the dinner he spoke to all of us and said, “You have nowhere to go, nothin’ to live on, but go out on my other plantation and build you some shacks.”

  With similar generosity, John Thomas Boykin, a substantial Georgia planter, turned emancipation into “a big day,” killed several hogs for the occasion, rolled out barrels of whiskey, and invited his freed slaves to enjoy themselves and consider his proposal to stay with him and work for pay.52 Whether or not a master consciously used such festivities to seduce his newly freed work force, none of those ex-slaves who recalled them claimed it influenced their decision to stay on or leave.

  Few slave owners, in any case, thought it necessary or desirable to accompany the announcement of freedom with a lavish entertainment. Maintaining the posture of the protective father, addressing his “children” who might soon experience the cruel and inhospitable world outside the plantation, many masters preferred to use this solemn occasion to offer advice and moral instruction. This was “no time for happiness,” a Mississippi planter told his former slaves, for they had no experience with freedom. Albert Hill, who had been a slave in Georgia, recalled how his master tried to explain to them on this day the difference between freedom (“hustlin’ for ourselves”) and slavery (“dependin’ on someone else”). Even as the master stressed the problems his slaves were liable to confront as freedmen and freedwomen, he seldom suggested, at least not in their presenc
e, that he may have been negligent in preparing them to assume the responsibilities of freedom. Rather, he reminded his blacks how he had raised them to be honest, to work diligently, and to lead moral and Christian lives. But at the same time, and without perceiving any contradiction, he usually urged them to remain on the plantation until, as one former slave recalled, “dey git de foothold and larn how to do”—that is, until they learned how to take care of themselves.53

  The least any gentleman planter could do at this time was to invite his “people” to stay with him and continue to share in the comforts, sustenance, and protection the old “home” supposedly afforded them. He acted, in other words, to preserve his source of labor in the guise of protecting his former slaves from the inevitable hardships and snares of freedom. Claiming a responsibility toward them as dependents, which emancipation should in no way compromise, some masters tried to ease the “burden” of freedom on the older slaves and the children. “Old Amelia & her two grandchildren,” Henry W. Ravenel wrote, “I will spare the mockery of offering freedom to. I must support them as long as I have any thing to give.” Whether from a sense of paternal obligation or to exploit their labor, some masters insisted that the children remain with them until they reached the age of twenty-one, and the apprenticeship laws usually permitted them to do so if the parents were missing or unable to support the children. Silas Dothrum, a former Arkansas slave who could not recall ever seeing his parents, was about ten years old when freedom came: “They kept me in bondage and a girl that used to be with them. We were bound to them that we would have to stay with them. They kept me just the same as under bondage. I wasn’t allowed no kind of say-so.” In some instances, the attempt to retain the children amounted to little less than kidnapping, with the masters resisting the efforts of parents to claim them. Millie Randall, a former Louisiana slave, recalled how her master “takes me and my brother, Benny, in de wagon and druv us round and round so dey couldn’t find us.” Finally, their mother induced the justice of the peace to intervene on her behalf.54